Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mutt on Windows Without WSL

blog.djhaskin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 78 posts

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#31

Post by evook »

dataflow wrote: post #23

> WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2. That's why you trash WSL2 and just stick with WSL1. I'm surprised they didn't mention it at all. Keep MSYS2 around for where WSL1 doesn't suffice, but that should be fairly infrequent.

There is an experimental flag[0] in the .wslconfig which let's you set autoMemoryReclaim to gradual or dropcache. On my laptop I had good success with dropcache and on my countryside desktop with gradual.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#exp...

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#34

Post by underlines »

dataflow wrote: post #23

> WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2. That's why you trash WSL2 and just stick with WSL1. I'm surprised they didn't mention it at all. Keep MSYS2 around for where WSL1 doesn't suffice, but that should be fairly infrequent.

I can't say WSL2 eats host RAM or vRAM:

I moved all my ML training and finetuning stuff (OSS LLMs, TTS, STT, Text2Img) to WSL2 and have only minimal overhead. A clean Win11 host eats away less than 2GB and I love how you can just use your cuda devices on WSL2, use something like micromamba and cmake your wheels while still being able to switch to Win tools whenever necessary. Idle Cuda devices use around 0.5GB vRAM.

Especially the two new experimental features in the last update of WSL2 added a nice QoL improvements:

- autoMemoryReclaim – Makes the WSL VM shrink in memory as you use it by reclaiming cached memory

- Sparse VHD – Automatically shrinks the WSL virtual hard disk (VHD) as you use it

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#35

Post by jasode »

rcarmo wrote: post #33

I used to do exactly this using Cygwin. I wonder why that is not an option anymore.

>Cygwin

The author uses MSYS2 which is based on Cygwin: https://www.google.com/search?q=msys2+based+on+cygwin

EDIT add : >I wonder why that is not an option anymore.

In the particular context of the blog, the author deliberately wants to make MSYS2 the main environment when he wrote: "These prerequisites are not just to use mutt, but to use msys2 successfully in any capacity for development or other work."

Therefore, installing Cygwin separately for Mutt would work but it contradicts the goal of him wanting to use MSYS2.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#36

Post by layer8 »

jasode wrote: post #35
rcarmo wrote: post #33

I used to do exactly this using Cygwin. I wonder why that is not an option anymore.

>Cygwin The author uses MSYS2 which is based on Cygwin: https://www.google.com/search?q=msys2+based+on+cygwin EDIT add : >I wonder why that is not an option anymore. In the particular context of the blog, the author deliberately wants to make MSYS2 the main environment when he wrote: "These prerequisites are not just to use mutt, but to use msys2 successfully in any capacity for development or other work." Therefore,…

While MSYS2 is based on parts of Cygwin, it is not Cygwin (as opposed to how, say, Ubuntu is based on Debian). MSYS2 and Cygwin have different goals and provide a different environment: https://www.msys2.org/wiki/How-does-MSYS2-differ-from-Cygwin...

The author probably prefers the MSYS2 way, but Mutt should work fine under Cygwin without requiring jumping through the hoops the author describes.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#37

Post by n_plus_1_acc »

jxdxbx wrote: post #6

re: using Unix tools on Windows, I do like that you can pipe the output of a program in WSL to the Windows clipboard (clip.exe). I was really surprised by this! I use pbcopy on the Mac for this all the time.

Beware of randomly truncated output https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4082

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#38

Post by jasode »

layer8 wrote: post #36
jasode wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cygwin The author uses MSYS2 which is based on Cygwin: https://www.google.com/search?q=msys2+based+on+cygwin EDIT add : >I wonder why that is not an option anymore. In the particular context of the blog, the author deliberately wants to make MSYS2 the main environment when he wrote: "These prerequisites are not just to use mutt, but to use msys2 successfully in any capacity for development or other work." Therefore,…

While MSYS2 is based on parts of Cygwin, it is not Cygwin (as opposed to how, say, Ubuntu is based on Debian). MSYS2 and Cygwin have different goals and provide a different environment: https://www.msys2.org/wiki/How-does-MSYS2-differ-from-Cygwin... The author probably prefers the MSYS2 way, but Mutt should work fine under Cygwin without requiring jumping through the hoops the author describes.

>While MSYS2 is based on parts of Cygwin,

Yes, this fragment is what my reply was about.

>it is not Cygwin (as opposed to how, say, Ubuntu is based on Debian).

I agree and that was not what my reply was claiming.

Instead, I interpreted the gp's comment as being unfamiliar with MSYS2 and how it's related to Cygwin to fill the use case for a UNIX-POSIX-emulator.

Extra trivia... as for whether "MSYS _is_ or _is not_ Cygwin" is a matter of context and particular person's perspective for comparison. Examples:

"MSYS is not Cygwin": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390890

"MSYS is Cygwin": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390961

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#39

Post by rcarmo »

layer8 wrote: post #36
jasode wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cygwin The author uses MSYS2 which is based on Cygwin: https://www.google.com/search?q=msys2+based+on+cygwin EDIT add : >I wonder why that is not an option anymore. In the particular context of the blog, the author deliberately wants to make MSYS2 the main environment when he wrote: "These prerequisites are not just to use mutt, but to use msys2 successfully in any capacity for development or other work." Therefore,…

While MSYS2 is based on parts of Cygwin, it is not Cygwin (as opposed to how, say, Ubuntu is based on Debian). MSYS2 and Cygwin have different goals and provide a different environment: https://www.msys2.org/wiki/How-does-MSYS2-differ-from-Cygwin... The author probably prefers the MSYS2 way, but Mutt should work fine under Cygwin without requiring jumping through the hoops the author describes.

It does. I had a Windows 7 VM and installed it on a lark. Took me 15 minutes (mostly installing Cygwin first).

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#40

Post by mimotomo2009 »

djha-skin wrote: post #7
xvilka wrote: post #4

Mutt is exactly something that would be nice to rewrite in Rust, moreover, splitting into various crates of working with email, so that it will be possible to reuse the same code for both TUI and GUI clients.

Already done: https://pimalaya.org/

It took only a second to see what I would miss as like on most of the mail clients: why isn't it possible to configure the list of mails to see not only the sender but the e-mail address? I only know three e-mail clients where I can configure it: mutt, betterbird and evolution. But maybe I'm old and no one would like to see that "bill gates " is not from bill gates before opening the mail (and render the contents). The phisher are thankful.
Post reply on HN